Book Review: Whiteout

Sunday 1 December 2013 - Filed under Books

Review of: “Whiteout” by Ken Follett (NLS DB-59331

Mixing suspense with Christmas, Follett’s book is a bio-thriller taking place over a wintry Christmas holiday in northern Scotland, filled with family drama. Toni Gallo is the highly-driven head of security for Oxenford Medical, a research facility working on a cure for Madoba-2, an especially virulent strain of Ebola. She also has a running feud with her ex, a local cop, and is pestered by the attentions of newsman Carl. But she really wants to be with her widower boss, Stanley, whose daughter Olga’s husband, Hugo, is paying unwelcome attention to his sister-in-law, Miranda, herself in uneasy love with a milquetoast boyfriend, Ned, whose daughter, Sophie, is the object of young Craig’s budding affections. Whew!

It is not until midnight on Christmas Eve that all this soap is rinsed away, and the plot kicks into high gear, as a band of desperate, violent thieves, led by Stanley’s son, Kit, take things into their own hands in the midst of a terrible blizzard. Predictably, things go suddenly, frightfully wrong. From here on out, Follett’s high-energy writing, complete with security cameras and secret places for snooping, delivers the expected thrills in zany, scary ways, with few if any threads left dangling.

2013-12-01  »  Marilyn Brandt Smith